John Whitesides

So, does anybody out there in the real world support a government-run "public" health insurance option?

House of Representatives Republican leader John Boehner doesn't think so.

He told reporters on Thursday: "I'm still trying to find the first American to talk to who is in favor of the public option other than a member of Congress or the administration."

Democrats suggested the Ohio congressman is not getting out enough, but Boehner thought otherwise. "I get to a lot of places," he said.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll found 57 percent of people in his native Ohio supported giving people the option of a government-run insurance plan, but Boehner said the idea was "about as unpopular as a garlic milkshake."

Pressed by a reporter, Boehner admitted he had never tried a garlic milkshake -- drawing the ire of California garlic growers.

The San Francisco Chronicle said Brian Bowe, executive director of the Gilroy Garlic Festival and the go-to guy for all things garlic, invited Boehner to next year's event.

"You can't go wrong with garlic," he said.

UPDATE: The Democratic Party's House campaign arm today fired off an email to supporters urging them to sign an online petition informing Boehner they support a public option.

And the pairing of garlic and healthcare reform inspired Democratic Congressman Mike Honda of California, who represents Gilroy, to deliver to Boehner a basket of garlic and this poem: "Two things make for a strong healthy heart. Gilroy garlic, for one, a good start. Public option? Also high, in the American eye, 65 percent ne'er want it to part."

Photo credit: Reuters/Desmond Boylan (man with strings of garlic in Spain)

President Barack Obama heads to Africa on Friday on the final stop of a weeklong trip that included visits to Russia and Italy, but before leaving Rome he will visit with Pope Benedict.

Obama has had an uneasy relationship with some Roman Catholics because of his support for abortion rights and embryonic stem cell research, which the church opposes.

He faced protesters when he gave a graduation speech at Notre Dame University, although his call for a "fair-minded" discussion on abortion earned several standing ovations.

But his relations with the Vatican have been cordial and he has spoken to the pope on the telephone. Obama told reporters before the trip that "there are going to be some areas where we've got deep agreements, there are going to be some areas where we've got some disagreements."

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- Photo credit: Reuters/Osservatore Romano

President Barack Obama remains hard at work at the summit of G8 wealthy industrialized nations in Italy on Thursday, while his top domestic initiatives stumble and misfire at home.

Obama's top legislative priority, a massive overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system, has lurched through weeks of intensive horse-trading and positioning on Capitol Hill, where five different committees in Congress are trying to fashion workable proposals that can win initial approval by the August recess.

That timeline appears to be slipping as the effort to attract Republican support, pare the bill's price tag of at least $1 trillion and find ways to pay for it without broad tax increases has left even some Democrats restive.

Obama's other priority in Congress, the climate change bill, faces a much tougher road in the Senate than in the House, which passed a version late last month.

Republican criticism of his efforts to turn around the economy also has grown as the jobless rate continues to rise and calls for a second stimulus spending package grow louder.

Meanwhile, polls show Obama's approval rating, while still strong, slipping slightly. A new CNN poll put it at 61 percent , down a point from a month earlier, while his disapproval rating inched up two points to 37 percent. In some areas he has taken an even harder hit, with his approval rating in the battleground state of Ohio slipping from 62 percent in May to 49 percent.

It's enough to make a guy not want to come home.

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Photo credit: REUTERS/Brian Snyder (Librarian Gary Klein looks at jobs at The Work Place, which offers career services, in Boston)

With President Barack Obama off in Italy during a weeklong diplomatic foray, Vice President Joseph Biden has the stage on Wednesday for an announcement of the administration's agreement with the hospital industry for $155 billion in savings over a decade to help pay for a planned healthcare overhaul.

For Biden, it is a rare chance to gain the administration spotlight by design, rather than because of his famously loose lips and periodic departures from the Team Obama script.

He strayed again over the weekend when he told ABC News the administration misread the economy upon entering office. Obama, in a round of interviews with U.S. television networks on Tuesday, was forced to backtrack and explain those comments.

Biden's expertise is in foreign policy, not domestic issues such as healthcare, and Obama has acknowledged as much by giving him the lead in dealing with Iraq and a prominent role on issues like Russian relations. Biden kicked off his role in Iraq with a surprise visit there over the July 4th holiday weekend.

The announcement on the hospital deal, which follows a deal with drug makers, comes as the administration hunts for ways to cover the cost of a healthcare overhaul with an expected price tage of at least $1 trillion.

After catching the national media off guard with Friday's pre-holiday weekend bombshell that she was resigning as Alaska governor, Sarah Palin gave the television networks a chance to catch up with a round of stage-managed interviews for the morning news shows.

Television correspondents lined up to land a few minutes with Palin, decked out in overalls and wading in the surf at husband Todd's family fishing operation. With children in tow on the fishing trip/photo op, she explained her decision to bail out of office more than a year early.

It had nothing to do with running for president in 2012, she said. She's just unconventional. Once she had decided she was not running for re-election, she knew she could not "play the political game that most politicians do," she told NBC.

"That is who we are as Alaskans and it's certainly who I am," she told CNN. "I'm not going to take that comfortable path. I'm going to take the right path for the state."

To ABC: "I'm extremely happy. Politically speaking, if I die, I die. So be it."

But in all the interviews, which included plenty of footage of Palin looking like the fisherwoman next door, she refused to close the door on a presidential run.

"I can't predict what the next fish run is going to look like, much less the next few years," she told NBC. To CNN: "All options are going to keep on being on the table."

But she sounded like she had read some of the critical stories about her vice presidential run last year. Using a word critics sometimes use to describe her, she told NBC that having the kids work at the fishing operation "teaches these kids to work extremely hard and to not be divas."

Palin's round of interviews managed to top the round done by President Barack Obama, who has been talking non-stop during his visit to Moscow. In several interviews, Obama took pains to correct Vice President Joe Biden's comment that the administration "misread" the economy.

 "I would actually, rather than say misread -- we had incomplete information," Obama said on NBC. "In some ways you're seeing the economic engine turn, but what we always knew was that a) this recession was going to be deep and b) it was going to last a while."

 "There's nothing that we would have done differently," he told ABC.

Obama even commented on Palin, saying he respected her comment the decision was a family matter. "She has a fairly loyal constituency in the Republican Party and the conservative movement," he said on NBC.

As for the topic that dominated the morning news shows, singer Michael Jackson's funeral, Obama had this to say about Jackson: "What I do believe is that black sports figures and black entertainers helped to create a comfort level with African-Americans that had an impact historically."

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Photo credits: REUTERS/Tami Chappell (Palin waves to crowd at rally in Georgia in December); REUTERS/Jim Young (Obama delivers remarks at Moscow)

After a week of holiday barbecue, hometown parades and constituent fence-mending, members of the U.S. Congress begin to drift back to Washington on Monday for what promises to be its most severe test of the year -- finding common ground on a mammoth overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system.

The Senate is back in session on Monday afternoon and the House of Representatives returns on Tuesday to begin work on melding two different Senate bills and three House versions into legislation that can earn initial approval from each chamber before lawmakers adjourn for the month of August.

There are plenty of obstacles for the proposals, President Barack Obama's top legislative priority this year, from trimming the potential $1 trillion cost to determining how to pay and whether to include a government-run public insurance option for approximately 46 million uninsured Americans.

Obama, meanwhile, arrived in Moscow on Monday as the United States and Russia try to break a stalemate on nuclear arms control talks. It is the opening of a weeklong Obama trip that also will include the summit of G8 wealthy industrialized nations in Italy and his first visit as president to Africa with a stop in Ghana.

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Photo credits: REUTERS/Hyungwon Kang (Fireworks over U.S. Capitol); REUTERS/Anatoly Maltsev/Pool (Obama and Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev at Kremlin)

President Barack Obama will take time out on Friday from unrest in Iran and a suddenly endangered healthcare overhaul on Capitol Hill to focus on fathering.

Ahead of Father's Day on Sunday, Obama plans several events at the White House and in suburban Virginia designed to highlight fatherhood and mentoring. Obama also wrote an essay that will appear in Parade magazine on Sunday and will have a Father's Day interview with CBS News.

Obama, abandoned by his father at age 2, last saw him when he was 10 years old and frequently talked during the campaign about fatherhood and his experience growing up. He will visit a program in suburban Arlington, Virginia, that provides one-year intensive training for urban young adults, then hold an event in the East Room of the White House to discuss fatherhood and mentoring and host young men from local schools at a South Lawn event.

President Barack Obama woke up Thursday to find two new polls -- the NBC News/Wall Street Journal and CBS News/New York Times -- showing growing public concerns over the high rate of government spending and ballooning federal deficits.

Meanwhile, his big-ticket initiative to revamp the U.S. healthcare system hit a road bump in Congress, where a key Senate committee slowed its schedule for consideration of the measure in order to find a bipartisan approach to rein in its huge projected costs -- more than $1 trillion and counting.

For Obama, the news was a sign, perhaps, that the public is beginning to hold him accountable for the many thorny issues he inherited from former President George W. Bush and becoming concerned about the mounting price tag -- the Congressional Budget Office estimates the federal deficit could top $1.8 trillion this fiscal year.

Obama, who had a full day of meetings at the White House and no public events until an evening fundraiser, remains personally popular but has seen his approval rating slip slightly to 56 percent, down from 61 percent in April, according to the NBC poll. Among independents it fell even more sharply, from nearly 2-to-1 to closely divided. He stayed steady at 63 percent approval in the CBS poll.

But Republican criticism might be gaining at least a toehold, with nearly 70 percent of respondents in the NBC poll saying they were worried about federal intervention in the economy, including the government's ownership stake in General Motors and potential government involvement in healthcare.

Only 37 percent say he is taking on too many issues, with 60 percent saying he was forced to confront a big agenda because the country has so many problems.

Obama said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal he was not surprised the drumbeat of Republican attacks was having some success.

"If you want to attack a Democratic president, how are you going to attack him?" Obama said. "Well, you're going to talk about how he wants more government and he wants to socialize medicine and he's going to be oppressive toward business. I mean, that's pretty standard fare."

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque  (Obama arrives for financial regulation announcement)

The debate on two crucial legs of President Barack Obama's reform agenda -- healthcare and financial regulations -- heats up at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue on Wednesday.

At the White House, Obama will unveil a plan for revamping regulation of the U.S. financial industry in hopes of avoiding the sort of systemwide failure that culminated in a recent banking and market crisis.

The proposal, which will face rigorous debate in the U.S. Congress, is expected to call for closing the Office of Thrift Supervision, a Treasury Department unit, streamline the supervision of savings and loans and establish an independent consumer financial products watchdog agency.

The Federal Reserve would have new duties to monitor risks to the financial system, but the plan does not call for a complete revamp of financial oversight, which the administration decided was political unachievable.

"The status quo is not an option," Christina Romer, head of the Council of Economic Advisers, said of the proposals on ABC's "Good Morning America."

On Capitol Hill, Senator Edward Kennedy's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee will begin at least three days of debate on its healthcare reform proposal. The Senate Finance Committee will unveil its plan this week as well as Congress kicks off a six-week sprint toward initial approval of a bill to revamp the sprawling healthcare system.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will address the Democratic Leadership Conference on the issue this morning, and speak to journalists later in the day at the White House as the administration ramps up its drive for passage of a healthcare bill.

There is a new crisis on the agenda for President Barack Obama.

While trying to revitalize a nosediving economy, rebuild the collapsing auto industry, rein in North Korea's unpredictable Kim Jong-il and overhaul the costly healthcare system, Obama now can ponder his response to an Iran reeling from a disputed election and the biggest street protests since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Several leading Republicans have hammered Obama for what they say is a too cautious approach to the disputed vote that gave hardliner President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a big win over former Prime Minister Mirhossein Mousavi. Obama said on Monday he was "deeply troubled" by the post-election violence but it was up to the Iranians to work out who their leaders will be.

Republicans say that is not good enough.

"He should speak out that this is a corrupt, fraud, sham of an election.  The Iranian people have been deprived of their rights," Senator John McCain said on NBC's "Today" show on Tuesday.

While Obama considers his next move on Iran, however, he will also grapple with North Korea during a White House meeting on Tuesday with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak. The South Korean leader has taken a tough line on North Korea even before Pyongyong ratched up tension in recent weeks by test-firing missiles, restarting a plant to produce weapons-grade plutonium and holding a May 25 nuclear test.